Canada still reads Ken Dryden's The Game

CBC Canada Reads has, as always, set a worthy group of books up for discussion this year, choosing for the first time to focus exclusively on non-fiction. If I have a rooting interest, it’s for The Game by Ken Dryden, defended by Alan Thicke. It’s a book that made a huge splash on first publication in 1983 and has weathered the subsequent decades remarkably well, staying in print and picking up new readers far past the point where a book tied to a specific hockey season–1978-79–might be expected to. Its stature owes something to how clearly it stands out among sports books, but to call it the best hockey book ever, as it certainly is, still sounds faintly condescending. It’s a Canadian classic, period.

I’ve read The Game three times, most recently this week, and there’s no denying that this time around the experience has been coloured by the poignant contrast between the proud team Dryden played for and the current Habs as they stumble through one of the bleakest periods in franchise history. The irony is, at times, almost unbearable, as when Dryden describes the waning Habs-Leafs rivalry of the late 1970s. “A series of ill-conceived drafts and poor trades (…) a competitive plateau that will lead nowhere until it leads down (…) the kind of petty self-indulgence that makes them frustratingly ordinary (…) The tragedy is what they had has been squandered and is now gone, with so little to show for it.” Dryden is writing of the 70s Leafs, with admirable candour for someone barely out of the league at the time (and someone who would one day–irony ahoy!–be president of that very club) but isn’t it eerie just how easily the very same words could be applied to the 2012 Montreal Canadiens?

The pain doesn’t end there. Far from it. Rejean Houle and Mario Tremblay are among the teammates to whom Dryden dedicates character studies worthy of the finest fiction, but what Habs fan could read those portraits now without cringing in the knowledge of what happened when those two were given jobs at the helm of the team in the nineties? Tremblay as coach managing to alienate Patrick Roy right out of town, Houle as GM bungling the Roy trade so badly that it cast a subsequent pall over the organization that has never really lifted–it’s not a pretty picture, and it leads in a straight line to the current comedy of Pierre Gauthier-authored errors: re-signing Andrei Markov without making sure he could still play, firing Perry Pearn just before a game, firing Jacques Martin for no clear reason and then hanging his replacement Randy Cunneyworth out to dry, trading Mike Cammelleri in the middle of a game for a player serving a suspension…I’ll stop there. One look at the current standings says it all anyway.

I didn’t mean to go off on a state-of-Habs-nation rant like that, but the fact that it’s so hard not to only shows how much this team has meant to so many people–different things to a hockey-loving anglo outsider like me than to locals for whom the team is focus for their very identity, to be sure, but all equally valid, and all captured for posterity, from a thoughtful and eloquent insider’s perspective, in The Game. Veneration of the team’s tradition, so overplayed in the official 100th anniversary celebrations that went on for a season and a half and felt twice that long, was something that still had to be earned in Dryden’s day. On re-reading I’m struck again by how willingly he goes against the unspoken rule by which hockey players never have a bad word to say about each other. When Larry Robinson, at the time a mere seven years into his Hall of Fame career, is described as being past his peak, it goes against every conditioned soundbite expectation, but it doesn’t read as petty or sensationalist because it serves a greater truth and comes so clearly from a place of respect. The same bracing honesty, mildly shocking in context, is evident when Dryden writes of the dynamics of playing in a two-goalie system with Bunny Larocque: “It means I am happy when we win and happier if I have played; unhappy when we lose, less unhappy if I haven’t played. And if the game is close and I am not playing, I will forget myself and hope for Bunny without reservation. But if it is not, I want Bunny to play well, but not too well.”

The Game does more than capture the essence of a team and a sport. It also provides a collateral social history through the eyes of a fully engaged citizen, nowhere better exemplified than in Dryden’s memorable account of the mood in the Montreal Forum the night the PQ won the November 1976 provincial election. Finally, The Game works so well, and stays so relevant, because Dryden is a real writer. Here he is on the mindset of a team that has won three straight Stanley Cups (they would go on to win a fourth in the season of which Dryden writes): “Sated by success, we have different expectations, and the motivations and feelings we get from a game have changed with them. Joy becomes obligation, satisfaction turns to relief, and the purpose of winning becomes less to win, and more not to lose.” Look at that last sentence again–it could almost be straight out of Marcus Aurelius or Lao Tzu. Don Cherry fades into nothingness even as we read it.

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